Overseas babies

I was just at the local Boots store looking for an empty spray bottle to water my new acquisition (spanish moss, a gift from the director of the local botanical garden which I visited on Friday). In the store during my reasonably random meanderings (sometimes it’s very difficult to tell where an item would be located) I saw a young Asian couple standing in front of, and debating the merits of, pregnancy tests. This was striking on several fronts. First of all, my female friends who have had babies have mostly tended to surprise their partners with the news (in one particularly interesting case, a friend of mine flung the positive test at her spouse while he was still in bed and said “Now look what you’ve done!”) such that they would not have been shopping for test kits together. Secondly, you stop and realize that this would most likely be a British baby, perhaps even a BBC (too bad my sis was not here to eavesdrop and identify which east Asian language was being spoken).

I think I had been here for more than half a year before this realization had dawned on me, that a child born to me here in England would technically be English and I would have to apply additionally for an American passport to match my own. In my line of work, it is quite common to have mixed up families and multiple passports so it’s not something I find terribly surprising overall, but it was funny how slowly I actually realized that this applied now to me as well. Moving countries has so many extra dimensions that simply do not occur to you quickly or simply.